IBM plans second Blue Gene supercomputer
By Stephen
Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/2100-7337-5162741.html
Story last modified February 20, 2004, 2:00 PM PST
IBM will install a second Blue Gene/L
supercomputer as part of a radio telescope project in the Netherlands, the
company plans to announce Monday.
The supercomputer will be used for a new radio
telescope project called Lofar, short for low frequency array, run by a
Dutch organization called Astron. The system, which is expected to be
complete in 2005, will run the Linux operating system, use about 12,000
processors and perform more than 30 trillion calculations per second,
sources familiar with the plan said.
IBM declined to comment for this story, but the
Lofar Web site said Astron signed a memorandum of understanding in
November to use Blue Gene in conjunction with the telescope. The
announcement said there are opportunities for cooperative research and
development between IBM and Astron for the Lofar supercomputer.
Today's fastest machine, NEC's Earth Simulator,
built in 2002, has a speed of 35.6 trillion calculations per second, but
new competition is edging closer, as Blue Gene/L and several other systems
bring new blood lines to the supercomputing gene pool.
Other new systems reshaping the list include a
system at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University with 1,100
dual-processor Apple Computer machines, based on IBM's PowerPC 970 chip,
and another at Los Alamos National Laboratory that uses 2,816 Opteron
processors from Advanced Micro Devices.
Another new chip is coming as well: Linux Networx
announced on Thursday that it sold the U.S. Army Research Laboratory a
system that uses 2,132 Xeon processors--1,066 of which are for Intel's
newly announced 64-bit "CT" extensions. The extensions, similar
to those in AMD's Opteron, are expected to arrive by June with Intel's
"Nocona" version of Xeon.
Blue Gene began as a research project to
investigate the biotechnology challenge of how proteins fold into complex
three-dimensional shapes. But IBM has been working to move Blue Gene
closer toward a product customers will buy for tasks such as financial
risk analysis or global climate modeling.
The first Blue Gene/L machine will be housed at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It's designed to have a top speed
of 360 trillion calculations per second, or 360 teraflops.
Its processors are special variants of IBM's Power
family. Each chip has two processor "cores," with one core for
processing data and the other for communications, with five different
networks that will shuttle data across the machine. For tasks requiring
little communication, both cores can be used for calculation.
One "half rack" of Blue Gene/L, with 512
dual-core processors, ranked at No. 73 on the most recent list of the 500
fastest supercomputers.
Lofar is expected to begin in initial operations in
2006 and full operations in 2008, according to the Lofar Web site.
Its design lacks the moving parts of a conventional
dish antenna radio telescope. Instead, it's planned to use an array of
about 20,000 to 30,000 sensors that gather data from the entire sky.
Computer control systems will process the information so that the array's
attention can effectively be pointed to a specific patch of the sky.
Research subjects could include the early universe,
supernovas, Jupiter, galaxy formation or a map of cosmic-ray origins.
Another way in which the system will need computing
power is for conducting continuous searches of large parts of the sky for
short-term events with bursts of radio frequency emissions. In addition,
data will be stored in temporary buffers so that it can be examined after
the fact, if other telescopes discover radio frequency bursts.
Computers are also required to compensate for
distortions of radio signals caused by Earth's ionosphere. A byproduct of
this correction process is a three-dimensional model of the ionosphere
above the telescope.
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Last updated:
February 21,
2004
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